Bible Belt, Eastern states saddest in America

(Christian Post) A University of Vermont research team has analyzed more than 10 million Tweets and claims that America’s “Bible belt,” or more conservative southern states, are generally less happy than the rest of the country.

“The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content, based on the appearance and frequency of words determined by Mechanical Turk workers to be happy (rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine) or sad (damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied),” The Atlantic explains.

The Vermont Complex Systems Center researchers did not use the context in which the tweets were made when analyzing the results for their study, which has not yet been released, but insisted that simply counting the words and averaging their happiness content produces “reliable” results.